Blog Review: Feb. 19


Arm's Urmish Thakker takes a look at TinyML, some of the challenges in developing efficient architectures for resource constrained devices, and an explanation of Kronecker product compression. Mentor's Colin Walls considers whether it's better to use single or multiple returns for a function when writing understandable, readable code. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares highlights from a prese... » read more

Understanding SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping)


Amol Borkar, senior product manager for AI and computer vision at Cadence, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about mapping and tracking the movement of an object in a scene, how to identify key corners in a frame, how probabilities of accuracy fit into the picture, how noise can affect that, and how to improve the performance and reduce power in these systems. » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Processors Arm rolled out a micro neural processing unit that, when combined with its newest microcontroller, can increase machine learning performance by up to 480 times. The company is aiming the MCU and co-processor across a wide swath of applications. Worth noting is that Arm calls its Cortex-M55 an AI-capable processor, rather than a microcontroller, as the lines between the various proce... » read more

Moore And More


For more than 50 years, the semiconductor industry has enjoyed the benefits of Moore's Law — or so it seemed. In reality, there were three laws rolled up into one: Each process generation would have a higher clock speed at the same power. This was not discovered by Moore, but by Dennard, who also invented the DRAM. Process generations continue to get faster and lower power, but the power... » read more

Reducing Power At RTL


Power management and reduction at the register transfer level is becoming more problematic as more heterogeneous elements are added into advanced designs and more components are dependent on interactions with other components. This has been a growing problem in leading-edge designs for the past couple of process nodes, but similar issues have begun creeping into less-sophisticated designs as... » read more

Brighter Future For Photonics


Photons increasingly are taking over where electrons are failing in communications, but mixing the two never has been easy. There always have been two potential implementation paths — building each on its own substrate and then stacking them, or building them on a single substrate. The tradeoff between the two solutions is more complex than it may initially appear, and ongoing improvements... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 12


Complexity is growing by process node, by end application, and in each design. The latest crop of blogs points to just how many dependencies and uncertainties exist today, and what the entire supply chain is doing about them. Mentor's Shivani Joshi digs into various types of constraints in PCBs. Cadence's Neelabh Singh examines the complexities of verifying a lane adapter state machine in... » read more

Uses, Limits And Questions For FPGAs In Autos


Programmable logic in automotive applications is essential, given the parade of almost constant updates and shifts in direction, but exactly where the technology will be used has become a moving target. This isn't entirely surprising in the automotive industry. Carmakers are moving into electrification and increasing levels of automation in fits and starts, sometimes with dramatic swings in ... » read more

Signal Integrity Through The Years


Yesterday, I started to talk about how new technologies find their way over time into EDA tools in my post How Technologies Get into EDA. Let's look at signal integrity as an example. We used not to worry about signal integrity at all. The first time anything like that impinged on my consciousness was in the early 1980s when we realized that we needed to start to consider the inductance... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 5


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the different ways persistent memories can be used, as well as a basic persistent programming model and key things hardware needs to support. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls explains what's different about operating systems for embedded applications and how to go about selecting one. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding finds troubling vulnerabilities in U.S. cri... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →